Thrive 0.3.4

Thrive 0.3.4 is here! Though a comparatively small release from a gameplay perspective, it represents a tonne of programming work on behind-the-scenes functionality and improved stability. It comes with a shiny new launcher to boot. Almost all these features are credited to hhyyrylainen and crodnu, two of our programmers.

In this release

• New Lua library. General performance improvements thanks to a restructured scripting system, fixing plenty of common crashes in the process. The console FPS counter is also fixed.
• A long standing bug that has caused some people to crash when they complete the tutorial has now been fixed (at least, it's fixed for those who've tested the release candidates).
• Loading saves should now cause fewer crashes due to audio errors.
• Overhaul of the microbial process system. Now, instead of draining ATP immediately, your cell will act smarter when allocating compounds towards different tasks and converting between them. This gives greater utility to the compound bars introduced in the previous release.
• Microbes drop a percentage of the compounds that compose their organelles on death.
• Different chance to generate each organelle in procedurally generated and mutated microbes (which means, among other things, less toxic vacuoles).
• Adjusted compound cloud densities to make the game easier. This area is still completely unbalanced, so it may not be much easier, but still.

Controls

• Point mouse to turn
• WASD to move around
• Mouse scroll wheel (or +/- keys) to zoom
• E to release toxins (if you have any)
• G to engulf other cells (you must be bigger in size)
• ESC to bring up menu.
• F2 to switch between microbe stage and microbe editor
• F4 to save game
• F10 to load previously saved game
• ESC to save a genus name change

Launcher

Perhaps the most obvious addition is the new Thrive launcher. If you don't already have it, download here. The launcher checks for new Thrive versions whenever it runs, running through the tedious and confusing downloading and unpacking tasks for you. It comes with handy feeds of new development forum posts and website updates, and future updates should give it greater utility.

Devblog

As ever, we have a Devblog explaining the release in more detail, including the extended functionality of the Thrive launcher. Check it out for the latest general news in the Thrive universe too.

Trailer

We decided to do something a little different for this release's trailer. Instead of some scenic shots of the game accompanied by thematic music, we used scenic shots of the game accompanied by thematic music AND a voiceover from developer MontySpud (with thanks to Naggorath for script assistance and video editing).

Engine changes

We're considering switching engine to the open-source Unreal Engine 4. You can read more about this in our Devblog. Here we'll leave only a link to the testing thread. We need as many people as possible to test the compatibility of this new version. If a future release using UE4 has errors on your machine, we'll gladly help fix them, but feel silently annoyed that you didn't test it out and tell us sooner.

Thrive 0.3.3

We might have missed the planned Christmas release date (and then the replanned New Years one), but we are finally here with Thrive version 0.3.3. It features a ton of frequently requested features, such as the reproduction and health systems and auto evo. Due to changes on the backend, we have also expanded our support for more players out there.

Lastly, I'd like to publicly acknowledge crodnu, our newest programmer, who's responsible for nearly half of the features listed below.

In this release:

• This release features a new GUI. We've been working on it for the last couple of month and it looks absolutely amazing. Many of the unnecessarily clunky elements have been removed to create a minimalistic and intuitive GUI. It is still a work in progress with some of the buttons not working, but it is a base that we will be able to expand on for the next releases.
• Mass—Previously, large cells weighed the same as smaller ones. Now, each hex has a given mass, and as a result, larger cells move slower and need more flagella to propel them.
• Auto Evo's primitive cousin: Random Evo. The tide pool is now filled with new creatures that will try to kill you with agents and phagocytosis and will mutate every time you exit the editor. Currently, there is no intelligence behind their decisions, so it's easy to get abominations of nature, but it's a step in the right direction.
• Reproduction System. Reproductase, a fictional compound and one of the main critiques we have about the cell stage, is finally gone! To reproduce you need to divide each of your organelles into two and then duplicate the DNA in your nucleus. Each organelle currently needs 2 glucose and 1 amino acids (made from 1 glucose and 1 ammonia) to split in half. In other words, make sure your glucose (white clouds) store is always above 16 and your ammonia (yellow clouds) store is above 12 and you'll be fine.
• Health System—you can now replenish lost health by getting amino acids and glucose. Damaged organelles will shrink and healthy organelles will grow.
• AMD graphics card support. We changed all of our shaders to glsl, so all those of you who don't have NVidia cards can finally enjoy the game's graphics. This broke some features (such as membrane tinting) that we couldn't fix for this release, but glsl shaders will allow us to create much better graphics in the future.
• Minor changes in compound availability between biomes.
• Linux is now simpler to set up.
• We're aware of occasional random crashes. We're not sure what's causing them and they appear fairly infrequently. If you have one, take a screenshot of the console and send it our way so we can work on fixing them for next release.

Controls:

• Point mouse to turn
• WASD to move around
• Mouse scroll wheel (or +/- keys) to zoom
• E to release toxins (if you have any)
• G to engulf other cells (you must be bigger in size)
• ESC to bring up menu.
• F2 to switch between microbe stage and microbe editor
• F4 to save game
• F10 to load previously saved game
• ESC to save a genus name change

Devblog:

Click here to read a more in-depth devblog about this release. It talks about everything we've been working on, as well as other unrelated stuff.

Trailer:

As usual, we also have a trailer showing off some of the new features. If your version of the game has a significant graphical difference to this, it's a bug so you should notify us by posting here.

Future:

Version 0.3.4 will focus on fixing many bugs and ironing out current game play. We will add a freebuild editor (unlimited mutation points) and allow you to change your membrane color. However, the main feature will be moving much of the lua code to C++. This will reduce lag and prepare everything for agents and a CPA system in 0.4.0 and beyond. A second focus will be to fix the process system, which doesn't work as quick and isn't as robust as it should be (which you will probably notice while trying to reproduce).

Thrive 0.3.2

Finally, the awaited end-of-summer release is here! It's a couple months after the beta that was released back in March, but we managed to squish in a bunch of new features since then and fix 12 game breaking bugs, some of which were here since pre-0.2.3. That means you should have very smooth gameplay with relatively few crashes compared to the old versions. But don't forget to save often (I spent over a week fixing that functionality)!

In this release:

• Compound Clouds! Enjoy the fluid compounds as they drift through the currents instead of the ancient, discrete particle emitters
• Continued Linux Support—Ubuntu, Arch, and Fedora should all work
• Colored Organelles—organelle materials are now tinted to be the same color as the membranes
• Damage Indicator—the membrane and all organelles now flash red when you take damage
• Process System—no longer spend hours trying to get 5 reproductase to reproduce only to have your cell get rid of it once vacuole storage are full!
• Engulfment Indicator—the membrane flashes blue when you engulf another cell (or another cell engulfs you)
• New biomes—whenever you die, you will be randomly placed into one of 5 new biomes. Discover them all!
• Endosymbiosis—engulf free-floating chloroplasts and toxin vacuoles repeatedly until you manage to assimilate them and use them for yourself
• Gameplay Tuning—less MP in the editor, better steering, less ATP consumed, and others...
• A bunch of bug fixes—most importantly, the save/load button actually works this time, and won't crash the game on you!

Controls:

• Point mouse to turn
• WASD to move around
• Mouse scroll wheel (or +/- keys) to zoom
• E to release toxins (if you have any)
• G to engulf other cells (you must be bigger in size)
• ESC to bring up menu.
• F2 to switch between microbe stage and microbe editor
• F4 to save your current gamestate
• F10 to load your previous saved gamestate
• F12 to save a name-change
• Symmetry button between undo and redo in editor

Devblog:

Click here to read a more in-depth devblog about this release. It talks about everything we've been working on, as well as other unrelated stuff.

Videos:

This time, we have both a release trailer and a play through video. The former shows off the various new features, while the later goes into an in-depth discussion of how to play the game.

Have fun Thriving!

Thrive 0.3.1

A couple months after the release of 0.3.0, we are proud to announce the newest version of Thrive: 0.3.1. Although this update is not as major as the last one and does not have any new gameplay, it is full of features that make it a lot more fun to play.

In this release:

• Linux Support
• Parallax Background
• Colored NPC Microbes
• Symmetry in the Editor
• Flipped Player Cell (Forward is now up in editor)
• New .exe Icon
• Cytoplasm
• A bunch of bug fixes (Audio, Broken Membrane, No Chloroplast, Flagellum, Species Name)

Controls:

• Point mouse to turn
• WASD to move around
• Mouse scroll wheel to zoom
• E to release toxins (if you have any)
• G to engulf other cells (you must be bigger in size)
• ESC to bring up menu.
• F2 to switch between microbe stage and microbe editor
• F4 to save your current gamestate
• F10 to load your previous saved gamestate
• F12 to save a name-change
• Symmetry button between undo and redo in editor
• (Cheat: if you ever get frustrated by reproductase, just press ‘p’)

Devblog:

Click here to read the more in-depth devblog about this release. It talks about everything else we've been working on.

Release Trailer:

Thanks to oliveriver, we also have a release trailer.

Have fun Thriving!

Thrive 0.3.0

Almost a year since our last release, and a month since the first release candidate, we finally bring you the awaited version 0.3.0.

In this release:

• Upgrade to Ogre version 2.0
• Brand new opening cutscene (and video support, in general)
• Cell Membrane (no more honeycombs!)
• Organelle models
• Organelles take up multiple hexes and can be rotated
• Microbe editor revamp: green highlight if you can place an organelle and red if you cannot
• Organelles can only be placed next to existing ones
• Compound storage should be slightly less worse (still not ideal, though)
• Tooltips

Controls:

• Point mouse to turn
• WASD to move around
• Mouse scroll wheel to zoom
• E to release toxins (if you have any)
• G to engulf other cells (you must be bigger in size)
• ESC to bring up menu.
• F2 to switch between microbe stage and microbe editor
• F4 to save your current gamestate
• F10 to load your previous saved gamestate
• F12 to save a name-change
• (Cheat: if you ever get frustrated by reproductase, just press ‘p’)

Future plans:

This graphics update has made Thrive look a lot better than before, but we still have a long way to go. The main goal for next release, 0.3.1, is compound clouds and fluid dynamics and to get a working linux build. We are hoping to release sometime this year unless something unexpected comes up… which most likely will. We have already implemented different microbe coloration (you can change every single cell’s color by going into the Membrane.material file), but we are currently lacking a GUI for doing this. Speaking of which, we currently have a couple people working on designing a better GUI.

For the remaining 0.3.x releases, we want to implement bacteria, a moving background, an options menu, and a couple other minor things (see the dev forum for in-depth information on the upcoming features). Although this hasn’t been discussed much and is completely my opinion, I think that 0.4.0 will be the release where we implement agents, toxins, and in-depth combat gameplay. This should make Thrive an actual fun game that you can actually play (it’s more of a simulation currently). 0.5.x will probably be the release with an in-depth AI, and 0.6.x will feature compounds, population dynamics, and auto-evo and will basically conclude the cell stage. Again, this is just my speculation on what could happen.

To finish everything off, here is a series of images of Thrive evolving through the years.

Thrive 0.2.4

Another half-year, another release! And this one brings you the long-awaited GUI update, which we kept promising soon while we were too busy to work on it! But it is done! And so we release! Yay!

Note, the linux release this time is on mega, thanks to issues uploading to GitHub.

New Features

• All the features from the previous release
• A super-awesome new GUI! Yay!
• New microbes, new behaviours!
  • Some microbes are now toxic, so be careful who you kill!
  • Others will hunt you down and shoot at you. Choose your battles wisely.
• Revamped reproduction! Swim, eat, metabolize, reproduce!
• Sound effects for everything, from button-clicking to microbe death!
• New compound models, for ammonia, amino acids, and reproductase!
• An arrow in the editor so people will remember which way is forward!
• Name your species! Click on your species name in the editor, write something, then hit F12!
• Thanks to the pre-release, we have fixed a whole lotta bugs!

Controls

• Point mouse to turn
• WASD to move around
• Mouse scrollwheel to zoom
• E to release toxins (if you have any)
• ESC to bring up menu.
• F1 to toggle alternate reality (Debugging feature)
• ` to bring up console (Debugging feature)
• F2 to switch between microbe stage and microbe editor
• F4 to save your current gamestate
• F10 to load your previous saved gamestate
• F12 to save a name-change

Known Issues

• The save button in the editor to save your creation is working, but the load button does nothing. Instead you can open the console with '`' (the key left of 1) and enter: loadMicrobe("MyMicrobeName") and hit the enter key
• For other less major things, go see our Issue List.

Thrive 0.2.3

That's right, as promised, here is the long-awaited midsummer Thrive release!

For the Windows release try the mirror: https://mega.co.nz/#!JEZw2RCR!trX-_MyZZwrFL0xx7CxW9siEqAb8DVQDFEc93fae7kY
And for the Linux release scroll down.

New Features

• All the features from the previous release
• Multiple AI species! Other types of microbe all swimming around, and it's easy for modders to add new ones too!
• Predation! Feed on the flesh of murdered microbes!
• Saving and loading microbes! Wanna share your latest and greatest creations? Well now you can send your friends more than just a screenshot!
• Mutation Points! Now making it slightly more annoying to make a giant microbe!
• Photosynthesis! A new Chloroplast organelle that converts CO2 from new CO2 emitters (and water, from our invisible water infini-emitters) into Glucose and Oxygen, for all your energy needs!
• Zooming in and out! Wanna keep an eye on the microbes spawning near you? Need more space to make ever-larger microbe monstrosities? Well, we've got the zoom for you!

Controls

• Point mouse to turn
• WASD to move around
• Mouse scrollwheel to zoom
• E to release toxins (if you have any)
• P in editor to place chloroplast
• ESC to bring up menu.
• F1 to toggle alternate reality (Debugging feature)
• ` to bring up console (Debugging feature)
• F2 to switch between microbe stage and microbe editor
• F4 to save your current gamestate
• F10 to load your previous saved gamestate.

Coming Soon

Work is on progress on a new GUI, which isn't ready yet, which is why there is no Chloroplast button in the editor. Expect another release in a few weeks with the new GUI, sound effects and whatever else we manage to do in the meantime. For the more distant future we are working on updating microbe graphics with a dynamic cell membrane, population dynamics and more!